What do President Obama, Madonna, the Chicago Blackhawks, Sarah Palin, The Los Angeles Lakers, and Tom Cruise all have in common?

They all have coaches.

Anyone in search of excellence in their profession seeks out a coach to guide them to the next level. Actors hire acting coaches. Singers hire singing coaches. Speakers hire speaking coaches. No one wins the Olympics, the World Cup, or the Super Bowl without a coach. Elite professionals in any field seek out coaches to help them reach their goals.

How many coaches do you have in your life right now? In what ways are you pursuing excellence? Not just excellence in your career, excellence in every area of your life.

According to a 2009 survey by Right Management, approximately 60% of employees say they plan to leave their current employer when the economy improves. If you read First, Break All the Rules the author suggests 12 ways those employees are disconnected with both the structure of their job and their relationship with their supervisor. The One Minute Manager offers three ideas to keep the 60%, The Five Dysfunctions of Team suggests tactics on building group acumen, or read anything by Peters, Drucker, or Kotter to improve your leadership skills to help retain that 60%.

Are all of these books teaching you how to be a better coach? In one way or another, I think they are. It comes down to coaching yourself or coaching others.

What’s missing: the examples above limit coaching to one realm of life.

Have you ever noticed that people come to work and talk about their families and then go home and talk about their work? The two worlds are profoundly interconnected. I have seen fantastic employees struggle at work because of something in their personal life. And I have seen people disconnected from their personal life because they are married to their work.

What if we coached all of that? Helped people get to excellence in every realm of their life.

Now that’s juicy. And awesome.

So let’s start right now. Take this survey of your own life:

On a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 meaning, “I am so miserable I want to stick a pen in my eye” and 10 meaning “I am so engorged with passion and triumph I radiate magic” how would you rate the following areas of you life?

Career

Money

Health

Friends

Family

Significant Other

Personal Growth

Fun & Recreation

Physical Environment

For any category you rated less than a 10, what would a 10 look like, feel like, smell like, taste like, and sound like for you? For example, a 10 for me in the health category would mean I look in the mirror and see a strong body. I would feel muscular. I would smell chlorine (my favorite smell from childhood) because that would mean I was working out in a swimming pool. I would taste healthy food (vegetarian for me). Sounds I would hear include other people working out or talking to me about health.

What about you? What’s your 10?

The point is to envision success viscerally, using emotion instead of intellect.

Finally, pick one category. What’s one thing you could do in the next 60 minutes to move yourself closer to a 10? Start there. And let me know how it goes.

I’d like to end with a video about someone that made a 60 minute choice and how it ended up impacting thousands of others. He had lost pretty much everything and decided to give away the one free thing he had.